The characteristic derp of young men is not appreciating that preventing catastrophic fail is the prime directive, against which all else must be subordinated. The counterconcept is recklessness. x.com/porterstansb...
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Профиль
Nils Gilman
Профиль VivelyHistorian of the intelligentsia. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Deputy Editor @NoemaMag.com. Check out "Children of a Modest Star": https://www.sup.org/books/politics/children-modest-star. Posts my own
The rule of law, in the end, is itself a political construct — one that the GOP no longer believes in
The BulwarkThe fact that a majority of Republican senators do not care that the Comey prosecution is dead on arrival and are willing to countenance the confirmation of its architect means something terrifying: The rule of law is now also almost dead.
"Everyone knows what the problem is: The [GOP] organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence…. We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” www.politico.com/news/magazin...
GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper ProblemParty veterans are concerned that the pipeline of young Republican talent is veering off course — and into terminally online extremism.www.politico.comThis callow yoof is just like an LLM: he knew everything but understood nothing www.ft.com/content/620b...
How Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘golden child’ of the AI trade, was laid lowThe $20bn hedge fund manager’s wild ride ended with a call to Ken Griffinwww.ft.comEven though many in the west were crowing about these events as “the third wave of democratization,” what I kept thinking at the time was, “An economic collapse this severe will almost certainly end in fascism.”
Nils GilmanFew in the West today understand what happened to the Russian people with the collapse of Communism. Here is one statistic: in 1987-88, 2% of Russians lived on less than $4/day; by 1993-95, 50% did. Observing this as it happened was a major formative political experience for me as a young adult.
This is correct: performative impunity.
Radley BalkoLike the hypocrisy and the open corruption, the naked, brazen lying is itself aspiring authoritarianism. They aren't lying to cover anything up. They're saying, "We know we're lying. You know we're lying. And we know you know we're lying. And there's nothing you can do about it."
“The final boss of circular financial”: youtu.be/B07mYv-IeU8?...
Nvidia’s $350bn OpenAI loan is scaring everyone | Ed ZitronYouTube video by The Tech Reportyoutu.beThe meta-conspiracy: the virus was manufactured in a Chinese lab at Fauci’s behest; it was a hoax when it came to America; it was not Trump who shut down the economy or who signed the inflationary bill for those disemployed; the vaccine killed 9m Americans; this was all Biden’s fault. Got it?!
Aaron RuparTUBERVILLE: Fauci killed 9 million people FOX BUSINESS: Yeah. We can't prove that, right? TUBERVILLE: We can
Very interesting findings here. Capital rather than labor is capturing the value from AI productivity gains (no surprise there) but they’re doing it through wage compression rather than workforce reduction. www.apollo.com/insights-new...
AI Lowers Wages But Doesn't Cut Jobs | The Daily SparkAnalysis of actual Claude usage data shows workers in AI-exposed occupations are experiencing slower wage growth, while employment levels in these occupations remain unchanged, suggesting companies ar...www.apollo.com“If the study of intellectual history is to have any ultimate justification, it is its capacity to rescue the legacy of the past in order to allow us to realize the potential of the future” - @joncatlin.bsky.social quotes Martin Jay: www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/16/t...
www.jhiblog.orgFree SPEECH concerns whether the gov't is formally censoring a person’s ability to speak. Free EXPRESSION represents a higher standard: the cultivation of a culture in which people can state deep disagreements without fear of professional or social sanction. salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/233...
The Mess At Pen America - Salmagundi MagazineBard professor and novelist Dinaw Mengestu resigned last month (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/arts/pen-america-dinaw-mengestu-resigns.html) as president of PEN America, seven months into a ter...salmagundi.skidmore.eduI don’t agree with Trump on much, but this is good — Dulles is an abomination and embarrassment. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...
Trump announces plans for sprawling Dulles Airport makeoverThe plans include redoing two the concourses and the removal of the airport’s aging shuttles known as “people movers.”www.nbcnews.comThe vastness of this space is hard to comprehend. The distance from Oujda in NE Morocco to the southern end of occupied Western Sahara is approximately the same as the distance from Los Angeles to Houston. The Atlantic coastline controlled by Morocco is nearly as long as the United States’.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò"Covering an area the size of Britain, Western Sahara is designated as a “non-self-governing territory” by the United Nations and remains on its official list of territories still awaiting decolonization." Eoghan Gilmartin for @africaisacountry1.bsky.social africasacountry.com/2026/07/odys...
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
Mark Joseph SternAgree with @jamellebouie.net that it's pretty clear Elon Musk wanted to eviscerate USAID *for the purpose of killing as many African people as possible.* Mass death wasn't an accidental byproduct of his "deep state" paranoia; it was a key mission of DOGE. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/o...
Also notable: it sure don’t seem like the US has become a more polite society as it’s become a more armed society.
Jake CharlesPermit less carry rapidly spread over the last decade and a half. Because of its recency, there’s been little systemic research on its effects. This new paper finds that it makes society meaningfully worse off.
No need to read any other reviews of Nolan’s Odyssey — though if anything she gives this dud too much credit
Rebecca SolnitJust read her: "Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad."